After you’ve warmed up by making a few Blind Contour Line Drawings, pick a small area of the landscape that you’re interested in. People always start with too much information. Work hard to reduce your focus down to something that feels manageable. On your paper, draw a format to work inside of. This one is about five by four inches. Start small.

Make a light contour line drawing – the same as a blind contour but you look both at your object and your paper – and then lay in your values. (Values are light and dark, also known as shading.) As you go, look for the opportunity to use your new shorthand method for drawing leaves or textures. Rather then getting caught up in all of the minutiae of a tree full of leaves, or all of the lines and edges in the bark of a Redwood tree, try recording just a few of those textural marks in a way that is highly connected to your vision (like the Blind Contour Line Drawing I mentioned in the previous post). Make sure those marks are the very truth of what you see.If you make marks, or draw lines, that seem absolutely real then you can get away with fewer of them.